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Slim Pickings on a Bronx Jobs Database

Trying to remedy “terrible technical problems,” BronxAtWork.com was taken off line Tuesday afternoon.

Updated, 3:45 p.m. | Jobs — and the lack of them — are a big deal in the Bronx.

According to state figures, the Bronx led the city’s other boroughs, with a 9.6 percent jobless rate in December. No wonder politicians and officials vow to bring jobs to the borough, setting up services like the jobs database at BronxAtWork.com.

The database was very easy to search: only one job was listed on Monday. That’s still an improvement over last week, when zero jobs were there.

The sole posting — which went up just Saturday — was for a “home health aide,” though for some reason the occupation is described as “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters.”

There were more listings in a section titled “jobs by e-mail,” which features bulletins about jobs for secretaries and meat stuffers, post-doctoral research associates and something called a “master explainer.”

“We’re actually having terrible technical problems with the site,” Kate Shackford, executive vice president of the development corporation, said of BronxAtWork.com. “We think we’re at the end of the problems. But we’ve decided to take it down for two weeks.”

His quote, “I believe the best social program is a job,” was featured prominently on the site.

But Ms. Shackford said her office was focusing more on prescreening job applicants in-house to match them with local employers. She said her group reached an agreement today with the Yankees to prescreen for several hundred jobs.

“That’s our focus, because of our frustrations with the site,” she said.

Indeed, the site seems to have suffered the same fate as other efforts by Mr. Carrion’s economic development advisers. Close readers of this blog will recall how the borough’s tourism promotion office did not change its phone’s outgoing Christmas greeting for six months. And a business booster Web site — put together by a Westchester County company — eventually lapsed into a dead link.

At midafternoon, the spokeswoman for the Bronx borough president declined to comment, deferring to Ms. Shackford, whose office did take down the site for its maintenance period.

But maybe change is afoot. A test post marked “confidential” from the borough president’s office went up last week looking for accountants and auditors — to work in advertising.

remember all those people that were holding up the construction site at Atlantic Yards, ” Build not Destroy Brooklyn, I bet You a lot of them wish they had a construction job right now that paid 35.00 an hour, —-developement equals jobs jobs jobs.

Here is a good reason not to raise personal income taxes, as the US budget soars, eventually they are going to have to raise taxes, and you don’t want your highest wage earners having to fork over large amounts taxes to the The US and then again having the state hitting them up again, your’e going to be at a disadvantage to lower taxed states

If that were true, than wouldn’t the new Yankee Stadium have put all those people to work?

As job creators, arenas and stadiums deliver about the worst bang for the buck imaginable. Spend the money on real infrastructure — not foolish boondoggles whose primary beneficiaries are billionaires.

Of course Craiglist has new job postings in the Bronx every day. BronxAtWork.com is a total waste of time and just another excuse for funneling money to politically connected people at BOEDC. The only jobs that site is creating are jobs for the people “working” on the site itself.

The reason there is high unemployment in the Bronx is because the welfare rate is so high there. If you take a look at welfare rates and unemployment rates across the country, you will see a positive correlation. This is b/c high welfare rates lead directly to high unemployment. What is the incentive to work for yourself when Uncle Sam will just give you a paycheck, and more, depending on how many kids you have?

The people on welfare in the Bronx are Lifers, most of them have never had a job, are single mothers and their children and it is a generational trap. So let’s keep it real, when you pay people to have kids and stay home, you get more of exactly that.

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